Topic: Moon - Cheap telescope photography

I own an old russian (means high quality lenses) 20x telescope, and sometimes I use it to gaze at the Moon (not many stars here). So I decided to take some pics, and after about half hour of fighting with 2 tripods and constantly compensating for Moon's movement I was able to get a few half-decent pics. The quality of the images is far worse than that observed through the eyepiece (i.e. without the camera), but you can still spot the craters.

How I did it:
my Canon A80 cam's lense about 2-3mm away from the eypiece (with that protruding tube unscrewed) lense; without any special extra-lenses or any converters because I dont know what I need and if I did I probably wouldnt buy it anyway cuz it would be so darn expensive (maybe if its not TOO expensive)

So here's my question:
if any of you have ever tried similar setup, I'd appreciate any tips (such as focus compensation on cam/telescope, etc) which would help me get better results next time.
or if you are familiar with optics, please tell me why is the quality so much worse when I zoomed in using cam's 3x optical zoom (last picture).

Also any online tuts would be very welcome.

Pics are on the bottom of this page, the last one was with 3x cam zoom

I separated the channels in PS, and here's the best image so far



[This message has been edited by asptamer (edited 03-02-2004).]

That's just excellent man, nice work!

this past weekend I was out with my Galileo telescope and was able to view the moon with 6mm, 12mm, and 20mm lenses and was actually able to see craters inside of craters...it was a great night on Saturday for stargazing... I also got a pretty good look at Neptune and Mars. I haven't tried taking any pictures through my telescope yet. I'll probably buy an adapter before I attempt that.

Taking pictures of celestial objects can become a complicated ordeal, as I have recently discovered (and I haven't even taken any yet).

Perform a search on astrophotography and you should find some resources. There are inexpensive adaptors of different types, that use different techniques, that you might be able to use to marry your camera to your scope. Of course, your biggest problem, as you've already discovered, will be keeping the moon in the shot without a tracking motor.

If you're lucky enough, as I was, to find a store in your area that deals specifically with telescopes, someone there will be able to help you. (Department stores and even camera stores aren't very good places to buy a telescope or accessories.)